Walt Disney and Werner von Braun teamed up to tell us how we were going to get to the moon…in 1955. There’s a certain familiar esthetic to the exercise — shiny, long pointy spaceships with fins, a huge multilevel rotating wheel a 50-man (literally, there are no women) space station, swarms of robotic-looking construction suits. They ditch the fins for their lunar vehicle, since you don’t need them in space…but they do keep the sleek pointy shape.
Every bit of it is wrong, in hindsight. I’m impressed with the elaborate models and the chiseled, handsome men who are floating about in the excessively roomy cabin, but von Braun’s vision of the future was all hype and glitz and was as ridiculous as anything Elon Musk proposes.
Whatever happened to that “Atomic Powered Rocketship” that was supposedly already under construction?
By contrast, Klushantsev’s Soviet space films were prescient – Kubrick was inspired by them.
And, for the horror films- Mario Bava’s Planet of Vampires inspired Alien. And had a marvellous cinematography.
And yet,…
von Braun was instrumental in putting actual Americans on the actual Moon less then 15 years later.
Probably a better scorecard than your average visionary dreamer.
(von Braun was technical director of the successful Apollo Moon landing program.)
Contra PZ, watching this today it’s mind-blowingly visionary. Remember this was not only before the space shuttle and the ISS, this was before Skylab, before the first spacewalk, before the first human in space, before even the first satellite!
So much of the animation and artwork here prefigured actual footage in space decades later. Astonishing stuff.
@3. Silentbob : “And yet,…Von Braun was instrumental in putting actual Americans on the actual Moon less then 15 years later.”
Exactly. For once we are in complete agreement here.
Also FWIW Musk may also be a nazi but his SpaceX compapny have proven they are capable of delivering and achiveing what they claim and silencing the doubters -0 for all icannot stand Musk as a person and a nazi.
Compare to the actual real life lunar flyby mission in 1968. Sure it’s different in detail – how could it not be? – but astonishingly reminiscent of von Braun’s vision.
Reflecting on how much space hype there was over my childhood and how excited I was. Now I’m a “space bastard” who thinks space colonies are likely not viable. And if anything, I think we’re losing progress towards that goal if it actually attainable. We need environmental science to understand the ecology we live in. Can’t create a new controlled ecology if we don’t know how.
These days I’m wondering if colonies on earth are viable.
The one I live in is rapidly falling apart.
The current leadership is actively destroying it.
Meh. Liked the Simpson’s version better
https://youtu.be/8wPH4MEK4tk?si=bwrewwUsrDLqlWlU
Long story short, the Cuban missile crisis really put a lid on the whole nukes in space thing.